A very different animal

Ready to give help.

Those familiar with my place high up in the trees and whom may also have glanced of late at the pages of my artists’ books and postcard collages know that there feature many animals, many birds. My tailed or feathered protagonists often out of place, oft too large for their present surrounds. They scale rooftops, climb cathedral spires; perch high on the mast of a ship on maiden voyage do my central characters. Sometimes they saunter nonchalantly past a city square. Sometimes they tiptoe or creep. And all the time they afford me chance not just to play with scale and humorous, I hope, foreign juxtapositions, but to convey feelings of awkwardness and oddness. They are out of place, not just in urban environment or strange land (the mountain lions home range is not Brussels), but also in feeling. Being animals, in form, they are easier to relate to. One is not distracted by the dissimilarities because there are so many. I am not covered in fur, with claws for fingertips and a tail to serve as rudder on mountain climb. I am so different that I look only at what the animal is doing in its new environment. It is on the sidelines, watching. It is looking for a safe place to curl. It is passing undetected. It is slinking through the city unseen. It, like me, feels the odd one out.

It was worth it if only to see the stars scuttle across the shore.

Fearful of losing them, time and time again.

It’s okay; your secret is safe with me.

In addition to what you can see here and in gallery two, I invite you to peer over my shoulder, I have tiny moving visuals captured with iPhone's aid for your amusement. But be forewarned, I am no filmmaker, seemed merely easiest way to share with you a book or two whose pages you cannot turn for yourself.

Over My Shoulder (I)
Blinking in the light

Over My Shoulder (II)
Eager for the old joys once more

Enjoy your eve, G